Cany Offshore Cup in the German Language
The event follows and expands the format of former Czech and Slovak sea racing events (like Ceska namorni ralye, Nike cup, Majova regatta, or Slovak SANY cup and Junacka Pasovacka) where CANY participated, too, which spark off the interest of sea sailing unwaveringly. These events place emphasis on development of basic seamanship skills normally missing at such an inland population like
• work with charts, pilots, boat electronic, self-evaluating meteorology and sea state situation, planning and handling terrestrial water navigation as well as an offshore course,
• sail at whatever condition while taking overall responsibility for the vessel and crew, considering its capabilities, status and safety
• face long-term crew load and planning its good man power allocation
• take care about the material and equipment while prevent their damage and minimize a risk of any continue racing impossibility
The big boom of the sea racing came with massive attraction of many skilful sailors mastering technical oriented standard inshore racing scheme. These crews discover new opportunity to sail within bigger crews on bigger boats at bigger areas. But their entry brings a big pressure to organizers of the sea events to accept rather the inshore technical format of racing preferred by these newcomers due to initial lack and maybe no interest about any traditional seamanship skills development among most of them.
At such case, a crew can be focused on technical aspects of the sailing purely and all the responsibility to locate, start or continue a race is transferred to the race committee and the event organizer. There is no wonder that some organizers accept these requirements gladly as it is considerably easier and cheaper for organizer to handle the event at protected and shallow water area from nearby single base marina supporting and giving room for all the necessary staff like technical services and equipment, background for the evening entertainment of all participants or accommodation for organizers while using maneuverable and light open rubber boats to set or change the short courses very rapidly.
On the other hand, the racers adhering traditional seamanship skills can never apply them within a 40 minutes lasting sausage course between two marks placed at visible distance started at perfect weather and wind conditions exclusively. There is no room to be concurrent to a crew mastering the technical sailing limited strictly into up and down wind courses. It is the same as to push a marathon runner to compete with a sprinter at a 100m line. Unfortunately, this is just a way of sea racing preferred and propagated commonly by Czech national authority CSJ today.
CANY doesn't defend against any sprint championship but voting for giving the same opportunity for all "long-distance" runners as well. We want to prevent a current trend when quality offshore events enjoying their significant popularity growth (like Velikonocni regata, Majova regata and others) are organized more and more unofficially outside the CSJ competency. Once these events become strong there will be no reason to find a back way to CSJ.
Those are the main reasons why CANY has started to organize its noncommercial and official offshore event since 2013. Our target is to put the highest level event recalling the traditional seamanship skills while crossing out the CSJ calendar competency widely by lack of no other such an alternative event. The length and place of the course at autumn Baltic waters is really demanding and can hardly find a concurrency among events organized by the other Czech organizers. The course itself, set between Germany coast and Bornholm Island while sailed to and fro at a single run, is a blinder. This event will hardly attract the pure technical racers for sure but that is just why it could be considered as an unofficial championship of Czech Republic at true offshore sailing.